The present disclosure relates to controller configured to control an apparatus. The controller can include multiple sub-controllers which are connected via a data network. The present disclosure also relates to a printing device having such a controller and a method for operating such a controller.
Systems exist for the administration of data on distributed hardware platforms which comprise multiple modules. Examples of these are CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture) or SMMP. With CORBA, platform-spanning protocols and services are defined so that a platform-spanning data exchange is possible. An important CORBA service is the naming service, which enables server objects to be addressed by means of an established name. It is common to these known systems that the resolution of the object references via object names is separate from the transport of the data. For example, object names are hereby associated with specific processes and the data administered by them at the individual modules, with which object names a connection between these processes may be established by means of the naming services so that these processes exchange data directly with one another.
Given use of these systems in a controller having multiple modules, a main module and multiple sub-modules are often provided. In such systems, a communication process that implements the communication with the individual processes and sub-modules is executed in the main module. If the processes of the sub-modules should exchange data in such a system, the individual processes then send the data to the communication process of the main module, and thus then relays the data to the respective process of a sub-module that should receive the data.
In DE 10 2005 062 576 B4, a controller is described which is designed for printing devices and has a parallel data bus that is connected with multiple assemblies. The assemblies additionally have an interface to a serial data communication for serial transfer of data. Larger data sets are transferred via the serial data connection, where the structure of the serial data connection occurs using the parallel data bus and a switching matrix.
The exemplary embodiments of the present disclosure will be described with reference to the accompanying drawings.